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Hannah Pless
'Hannah Joli Pless '(1884 - 1972) was a Varanelli theoretical physicist and mathematician considered among the founders of quantum mechanics, and often considered the greatest Varanelli scientist of all time. She is most notable for formulating the theory of wave-particle duality and laying the foundation for the Pless-Reinholdt Equation, which serves as the basis for quantum mechanics. She was also notably among the first prominent female scientists, and was also an outspoken feminist and social critic whose significance to the field of quantum mechanics has often been neglected outside of Varanell. She never won the Patrean prize in her lifetime, often considered to be the most wrongful snub in the institution's history; however, she has posthumously won a wide array of honors and is widely regarded as among the greatest physicists of the twentieth century. Biography Pless was born to a working class family in Ledenes, who had moved there for good factory work from their original home in Alinde; as an only child, she was encouraged by her family to succeed, and - despite social pressure to conform to gender roles - applied to study mathematics at the University of Ledenes in 1901. She graduated in only three years, and in the process came to be regarded by some of her professors as the greatest mind they had ever encountered. In particular, thermodynamicist Hughe Devalle encouraged her to apply to the University of Correfuscidia, which - despite his strongly worded letter - rejected her on the grounds that a woman could not study mathematical physics. Hughe Devalle's letter, however, came to the attention of Tenhe Bharutra, who had been denied tenure at Correfuscidia because his radical theory of special relativity was disfavored by the Classicist physics faculty in power there, and who encouraged her to come and study with him at the Piron Institute of Science in Adrianis. She was accepted on his recommendation, and began to study theoretical relativistic physics under Bharutra's tutelage. Meanwhile, Bharutra's theories had been gaining broader acceptance, and the Classicist faction lost power at Correfuscidia and invited him to return. He did so under the condition that Pless, whom he now considered his protégé, could follow him, and they accepted. Pless's thesis work, which she did alongside Bharutra, proposed that light could be understood as a particle as well as a wave and not just a particle, with a relativistic momentum p = L/lambda; thus comes the Pless wavelength, lambda = Lc/p. When Bharutra won the Patrean prize five years later, he was commended for both his work on special relativity and on wave-particle duality, which the Academy referred to as "perhaps the greatest revolution in physics in a century" - and yet Pless never received the prize. While Pless could potentially have stayed on in the faculty in Correfuscidia, she ended up opting to return to Varanell to work at the University of Varnessia. Her reasons for doing so are complicated; while she at the time claimed that she simply wished to return to her native country, a Varanelli man she had been dating at the Piron Institute (Alexander Jalinde) had gotten a job there, and she may have partly returned to be with him. She wrote later in her life that she regretted letting a man get in the way of her career, as did her friend and mentor Bharutra. While she and Jalinde married a year later, they separated only five years after that without children. While she legally changed her name to Hannah Joli Pless Jalinde during the marriage, she continued to publish under H.J. Pless. Pless turned her attention over the next period of her life to studying how particles such as electrons could be represented as waves, work that brought her into contact with Noriki-Lasterian physicist Dieter Reinholdt at Astor University. Reinholdt in 1926 would publish an equation that solved classically for the energy of a particle using the Pless wavelength, and based heavily on a 1925 paper by Pless, and as such derived the Reinholdt Equation; however, traditionally in Varanell and increasingly around the world, this equation has sometimes been called the Pless-Reinholdt Equation, acknowledging Pless's fundamental contributions. Pless would spend most of the rest of her career trying to generalize the Pless-Reinholdt Equation (which she would have called the Psi-function) ''for various atomic states and therefore develop a theory of the atom and of bonding. While she Activism and Politics Hannah Pless considered herself a feminist (''fiministe), and fought for women's rights throughout her whole life, particularly the right to vote (which was granted in Varanell in 1912) and for equal professional dignity. She particularly tried to make women more accepted in the sciences, and also to push back against the ideas that women had to be mothers and wives foremost. She was outspoken on all of these issues, which received much criticism from the mostly male members of her field, who claimed that she had a duty to science, not to politics. She would reply to this by insisting that as a woman in science, she had no escape from gender politics, and there was no option but to speak out. This is, however, in contrast to the other few prominent female academics living at the time, most of whom attempted to stay quiet about political issues such as not to appear as radicals. Pless had no such concerns. She was openly critical of capitalism and wealth inequality and vocally supported the Varanelli left; quietly, she supported Haastian anarchism, and in fact had an epistolary correspondence with Amyik von Haast before his death. She wrote several articles for prominent leftist magazines arguing why she felt that she had a duty to speak out politically. These strong political stances were harmful for Pless's standing at the time in the physics community - not only was she a woman in an almost exclusively male field, she was easily caricatured as an "angry feminist" and was largely excluded from the histories of physics written in the 1950s and 1960s, even as she sought to mentor young women to be scientists, mathematicians and engineers through her organization the Pless Society (which is today the largest scholarship association exclusively for women in the world). Legacy After her death in 1972, a number of articles came out glorifying Pless's role in the founding of modern physics, particularly for theorizing wave-particle duality and laying the foundation for the Pless-Reinholdt Equation, which largely serves as the basis for quantum mechanics. These included a 1974 biography, which made Pless significantly more famous. However, all of these publications deemphasized Pless's social and political roles, and focused on her almost exclusively as an academic - arguing that she had not been given her due as one of the founders of quantum physics, even though ''she was a woman with many obstacles in her way, but with little mention of how she fought against those obstacles and tried to clear the way for the future. This wouldn't change until the early 2000s, when a new round of scholarship around Pless began to change the narrative, particularly Roge Helbe's 2003 biography ''The Paradox of Duality: Hannah Pless, Physicist and Revolutionary, which presented Hannah Pless as more than simply a physicist and considered the role of the public intellectual and the philosophical interpretations of physics; it used as a central conceit Pless's revelation that light is both a particle and a wave as an allegory for many aspects of her life. It was made into a 2005 biopic, The Duality Paradox, which was immensely popular and caused Pless's life story to enter the public imagination in a way it never had before. Having once been almost completely ignored, Pless has since 2005 become one of the most famous, studied and discussed scientists of all time.